It turns out that legalizing marijuana may just cut down on crime. A new study reveals that medical marijuana legalization is not associated with an increase in crime.
Scientists took a look at the FBI's Uniform Crime Report data across the country, paying special attention to states that have legalized marijuana, according to The Wall Street Journal. While people have stated that legalization might encourage crime in the past, the researchers found just the opposite.
"The main finding is that we found no increase in crime rates resulting from medical marijuana legalization," said Robert Morris, one of the researchers, in an interview with UPI. "In fact, we found some evidence of decreasing rates of some types of violent crime, namely homicide and assault."
In fact, the researchers found that between 1990 and 2006, eleven states legalized marijuana for medical use. These states included Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Yet this legalization showed no increase in crime.
"We believe that medical marijuana legalization poses no threat of increased violent crime," said Morris in an interview with The Huffington Post.
The findings reveal that legalizing medical marijuana is probably not a bad move for states. It's likely that, in the future we'll see far more states legalize the use of this substance. This could be a boon for patients who seek out the drug in order to relieve certain symptoms for conditions such as multiple sclerosis and others.
